Someone on another forum asked what effect celibacy has on the sacral chakra. I wrote a long answer and thought I should share my thoughts publicly:

“I spent just over a year celibate up until this summer, and even now continue to re-engage slowly and with care. My celibacy streak (less a strict edict than the result of a practice of radical discernment) was coupled with an intentional deep trauma healing process and unexpected spiritual awakening, but it’s hard to tell which came first – the celibacy or the process. The entire incel (involuntarily celibate) community is probably the least evolved group of people on earth, so celibacy alone without commitment to inner work won’t do much.

What I did notice was that an enormous siphoning of my energy was remarkably stopped – it was as though I had been a leaky boat the whole time, unconsciously funneling energy to partners in order to maintain the sexual relationship. Without someone to focus on, my surplus efforts redirected towards my community and then myself. I got more done this year than I ever imagined possible – finished recording my album, wrote most of my next book, rebranded my coaching business, recorded 9 episodes of a web series about peaceful communication, cooked two 12-course dinner parties, attended 10 medicine ceremonies, completed a 6-week healer’s training, and threw my first commercial weekend-long retreat. So, there’s some evidence for you. Granted, I set intentions to do all these things, so again, ymmv.

Celibacy also functioned as a sacred space for healing sexual trauma, and to feel that there was a period of time to safely remove old sexual imprints without new ones coming along to muddy the waters. In that space I learned to listen to my body and set boundaries, because in all my prior sexual history I could only ever hear what my partner wanted. In the past I had gone stretches of time without sex, but my fantasies still always revolved around pleasing a partner, because my body understood the security of approval more than it understood its own pleasure. Undergoing multiple trauma healing modalities allowed for me to remove the false people-pleasing programming as well as the PTSD symptoms of desensitization/depersonalization and start listening to what actually made my body feel safe and nourished. I had no idea how accustomed I had become to brutality, nor how skewed my worldview had become where I felt I could expect no better because that’s just how the world was. (You may have noticed the collective is also currently learning these same lessons about how bad things currently are and how much better we are deserving of. I’m far from the only one on this wave but I did begin setting intentional magick around this at the end of 2015 and it has been trippy seeing it scale far larger than I ever thought possible.)

Anyway I was kicking and screaming most of the time but looking back I really don’t see how I would have been called to do all this work on my own had I been partnered, or having casual sex, or worst of all in that grey zone between being casual and being partnered. I’m grateful to be able to enter my next relationship as the better version of myself that I became during that time period (or am still becoming, spirit tells me – it’s not quite over yet). If you have the space for it and you’re willing to do the work along with it, then yes it can absolutely change your life.”